DESCRIPTION(Provided by Applicant): The Dermatology Department at the University of California, San Francisco, has a long tradition of training promising young scientists to be successful, independent investigators. With the recent expansion to the Mission Bay Campus, UCSF is adding a 510,000 square feet of new research space and is recruiting around 100 new faculty members to take advantage of the new space. The UCSF Dermatology Department is also expanding in terms of research space, the number of faculty conducting basic and applied research, and the number of residents and fellows. The UCSF Dermatology Training Program encourages physician scientist trainees to pursue cutting edge research in any laboratory in the UC system. This allows the trainees to choose from all the outstanding UC faculty, regardless of their departmental affiliation. Building on our successes in the past and capitalizing on the UCSF expansion, we propose to expand our training program to not only train physician scientists, but also Ph.D. fellows who will become successful researchers in skin biology. The UCSF dermatology training program is designed to prepare physicians and Ph.D. scientists for a lifetime of scholarly pursuits with the ultimate goal of understanding the molecular basis of skin diseases and finding new therapies for these diseases. Our two-fold goals of exposing our physician scientist trainees to the rich scientific research milieu at UCSF and of recruiting Ph.D. scientists to study skin biology in the department will ensure that a cadre of young scientists will pursue academic careers in dermatological research and advance the field in fundamental ways.